Americans Elect could put Buddy Roemer on presidential ballot

WASHINGTON -- With deep pockets and a bold plan to challenge both parties from the center, Americans Elect has budgeted $30 million to gain ballot access in November in all 50 states for a presidential ticket that will be chosen in several rounds of online voting between April and June. The audacity of its ambition is matched only by public disgruntlement with the grinding partisan gridlock in Washington, a disgust that the leadership of Americans Elect believe make this moment ripe for picking a president independent of two parties they say are each hopelessly beholden to opposite ideological extremes.

Jim Cole, Associated PressFormer Gov. Buddy Roemer, a Republican presidential candidate, speaks after filing his declaration of candidacy papers in October to run in the New Hampshire presidential primary.

"We've got to blow it up, and this is the biggest way to do it," said retired Adm. Dennis Blair of the two-party system. Blair, a former director of national intelligence for President Barack Obama, is a recent addition to Americans Elect's nine-member board, chaired by billionaire Peter Ackerman, a former top lieutenant to junk-bond king Michael Milliken, and the managing director of RockPort Capital and chairman of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.

"We are offering a priceless gift of guaranteeing someone a third column in next November's election," Blair said.

On whom this gift might be bestowed is anyone's guess, but officials of Americans Elect recently briefed former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer, a Democrat-turned-Republican whose reformist bid for the GOP presidential nod has, up to now, failed to gain any traction.

When Americans Elect, whose leadership team includes Mark McKinnon, who worked on Roemer's successful 1987 campaign for governor, put up its candidates page this month (http://www.americanselect.org/candidates), there was Roemer, listed as the public figure whose views most closely matched a national survey conducted for Americans Elect by Ipsos Public Affairs.

'Moderate libertarian'

This does not mean that Roemer has an inside track. The selection will be made by delegates who register with the site -- some 300,000 so far -- whose actual voter registration will be verified by Americans Elect, and whose views on a battery of questions developed by Ipsos seem decidedly left of center.

Indeed, in tweeting his supporters to link to the site that had just named him the most in-touch of leaders, Roemer cautioned that he "was not asked to answer questions" on which the results depended and that some of the positions attributed to him were incorrect.

Jesse Gordon, co-founder of OnTheIssues.org, the website that provides Americans Elect with its thumbnail representations of where each prospective candidate stands on the issues, said they base their analyses on past statements and actions and what he acknowledged were "inferential leaps that some readers might consider too large a leap."

He said they welcome corrections and amplifications.

According to OnTheIssues, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who in August said "corporations are people," is a "populist-leaning conservative" -- while Roemer, who has attacked the corrupting influence of money on politics, embraced Occupy Wall Street, and called for a return to protective tariffs, is "a moderate libertarian conservative."

Indeed, Roemer's refusal to accept any individual contribution greater than $100 -- and his reporting of every dime he receives -- would make him an odd pairing with Americans Elect, which changed its IRS status last fall from that of a 527 political organization, which has to identify its donors, to that of a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) social-welfare organization that does not have to.

Americans Elect spokeswoman Ileana Wachtel said that was necessary to shield prominent Democratic and Republican donors from "reprisals" from their former party comrades.

"Buddy has an issue with that," said campaign manager Carlos Sierra, who said the first question Roemer asked the folks from Americans Elect was how they were funded.

The question of Americans Elect's donors and tax status is part and parcel of the fine line the organization is treading as it seeks to empower Americans to directly choose a presidential ticket that it hopes will reflect the political sensibilities of its founders.

Gaining ballot access

Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, said that, in gaining ballot access in one state after another, Americans Elect functions as a political party, and he has written the IRS asking that they revoke the group's 501(c)(4) status.

But, Wachtel insists, "we're not a political party. We're a second nominating process. We do not fund or support any candidate." Americans Elect, she said, will not campaign for the choice its process produces.

Richard Winger, publisher of Ballot Access News, said that Americans Elect should be applauded for taking on what he describes as an undemocratic hodgepodge of state ballot-access rules, although the group is not yet on the ballot in Louisiana. But Winger said he has never encountered a party without a program.

But clearly its donors and leaders -- which include former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican; former FBI and CIA Director William Webster; and, as its CEO, Kahlil Byrd, a former communications director in Massachusetts to Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, and to unsuccessful Senate candidate Jeff Beatty, a Republican -- have a kind of candidate in mind.

"The bylaws were set up in a way that gives me confidence that we'll have a candidate who I would be able to support," Blair said.

He said he also believes mass participation online will bend the result to the center.

"I think we're going to get a broad selection of Americans who will be generally reflective of the moderate, centrist, independent view," said Blair, who resigned as Obama's director of national intelligence last year at the president's behest after a little more than a year on the job.

"It's all terra incognita," said Will Marshall, the president of the Progressive Policy Institute and a mainstay of Democratic Party politics, who is among the Americans Elect leadership team working on developing a platform of questions for the prospective candidates.

"It's important to say that it is a guided effort, not just an unguided democratic missile. There will be rules designed to prevent it from being commandeered by ideologues, but that is difficult to do when you don't have an explicit ideology," said Marshall, who acknowledged that, when all is said and done, he may find himself voting for Obama a second time.

"They are going to have problems as this develops between what the board thinks is responsible centrism and what the public thinks," said Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, which follows the way technology is changing politics. "The public on many of these issues is actually more liberal than this mythical center.

"They present themselves as a neutral vehicle, which would be great, but we all know that the golden rule of politics is that he who has the gold rules -- and that's why they need to be really transparent so that we can judge whether we should trust this vehicle," he said.

Nomination in June

But, he said, with money and talent they are putting into it, "I take it all very seriously." And when it nominates a candidate in June, "the media will not be able to resist a new wrinkle in the story."

"I wouldn't write this off in any way," said Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, the author of "Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress -- and a Plan to Stop it." Lessig said that while he would prefer Americans Elect to be more open about its funding, he does not believe it would taint Roemer, who he believes would, given the gift of ballot access, prove a formidable general election candidate.